Brushes with Shades of Red
by HVK
Summary: Request for BotgalHS on tumblr, who asked for something with Kankri brushing the Handmaid's hair. After they are both revived and strike up a relationship, they both have their shares of scars. A Beforan would-be preacher and the Alternian calamity have found that they have a lot in common, with each other. Caution: elements of past child abuse alluded to.


Done as a request for my good friend Botgal, who asked for something cute with Kankri brushing the Handmaid's hair. Based on some of her headcanons with Kankri having an abusive culler, I got the idea of him and Alternian Damara having a surprising amount of things in common and the ideas took off from there~

Disclaimer: I do not own Homestuck. This is a work of fiction purely for entertainment value, with no intent of monetary gain.

* * *

The two of them had a ritual of sorts, a signal. It was unusual in that was _not_ something either of them had suggested or discussed with the other one, but had arisen very organically. Neither of them wished to bruise the others' boundaries.

The Handmaid, Damara Megido of Alternia, gave a signal of that kind to Kankri Vantas of Beforus as she slipped partway into the pool, undoing her hair so that it flowed behind her and onto him, cocking her head and softly speaking in a language no longer spoken on any world besides right here and now, and asking him to approach.

He did so, and noted how the Handmaid held her body so stiffly, like a wooden rod dipped in metal; too much stress, hardship and pain had long since cast into into something that did not permit the slightest trace of flexibility. Unbending, firm and so brittle from the heat treatment – because of course you had to put such metal through pure hell to make it so solid and unflinching – that you could _hear_ the creak of the pressure trying to snap it in half.

And yet she relaxed when Kankri laid a relatively small hand against her back. Not very much, that was true. When it came to poise that was so grim it bordered on stiffness she was unwavering. As if maintaining absolute control at all times was an absolute necessity. Kankri did not doubt that she'd had that lesson drilled into her at a young age, either because her warden – and he chose that word, because 'caregiver' felt horribly inappropriate – had wished his servant to be _perfect_ in every respect and demanded it of her. He knew all the signs of that.

Her neck was firm, her horns twisting high over head and casting a show behind her. Absolute self-control like that was a matter of basic survival. She swallowed her pride and acted the part given to her, pretending to every single part of the song and dance she was trapped in until she could escape or turn it to her own advantage. His hands, softly sliding an ornate comb he dreamed up from memories of the nations her Beforan incarnation had come from, trailed across old and ragged scars shining dark red on her charcoal-colored skin. She permitted him to touch her there, and that was significant; the scars on her body were lingering reminders of times before she mastered that art or failed to please. They were nearly... sacrosanct.

He knew about scars. Reminders that would always be with you.

(And sometimes, when they were alone, the Handmaid would gently peel Karkat's high pants with a complete lack of shame, indifferent to the impropreity. Kankri allowed her to, still and silent as she knelt before him so that the _much_ larger Handmaid was at the right height to gaze down into his eyes. At this point he'd be nearly at eye-level with the large, soft swells at the front of her robes; perhaps at other times she might take the satisfaction to relentlessly tease him, but not then and there, not in the grips of demons he couldn't fathom and didn't want to know.

(There, her claws – so heavy and blunt they were more like hooves – would peel away his clothes and gently embrace his naked form, touching the scars lining _his_ body. They were always in places where it wouldn't have shown; where a young wriggler could be paraded to the society bluebloods and let them praise what a _dear_ his culler was, what a good highblood to take pity on such a sad and benighted creature, so horrifically mutated that what might have been a limeblood had fuchsia and rust in his veins to make monstrous red, and none of them would ever know what was done to him behind closed doors and soundproofed walls whenever he failed to please or was in any way an imperfect child.)

Kankri's expression was grim, not so different from her own. Tired, too stubborn to stop _now,_ and not quite yet at terms with the idea that he was well and truly free. The past had its own kinds of shackles. Kankri burned and suffered in hateful silence, in any lifetime; here, the torture was mostly inside his own head, where no one could hear him whimper in the dark.

Yes. Kankri knew a lot about the special tortures dealt out by wardens with cold smiles, quick hands and devious minds constantly looking at a ward for the slightest trace of imperfection. Like a artisan studying a plate for the slightest fault or weakness. Easier to just smash it and reforge it, and to a mind like that the marks were _appealing._

Even sitting with her back to his, the Handmaid seemed to know what was going through his mind. She didn't turn around or move but he felt a pleasant pressure brushing against the back of his neck, down his shoulders; 'fingers' of telekinetic force gently cupping his body, as gingerly as a loving hand moving expertly on his skin, on the gaps between his soft-shelled plates and sliding _just right_ between the hard spots...

He made a soft sound, and allowed her to do so.

(The Handmaid and him understood each other, and she would hold him, studying the marks of suffering upon his body in intimate detail. So often she would examine his wrists, as her memory made her see charred flesh and molten iron, and then she would hold him; his naked body pressed to hers, in a curiously chaste way, and he would submit, leaning his head into the softness of rumblespheres larger than much of him owing to their size difference, and this was an acceptable circumstance. She held him like a woman yearning for forgiveness, haunted by sins she would never dare to speak aloud.)

Here and now.

Kankri traced his claws against her scars, and the chill of time radiated from them; it was humbling, making him feel small and frail, and yet it was perplexing to consider. He was in some strange way older than she was, if you didn't count the constant time loops she had floated through; he'd died the first time right before her universe had come into being – or, if you really wanted to be pedantic, when they had reset his universe, set it all up and started over – and she had materialized long after Alternia was gone. And yet, despite being older than the timeline she had suffered through, he _felt_ younger than the Handmaid. His claws moved along the curve of a faded cut, perhaps administered by a whip or the claws of some fell creature, that shone red-brown. Against the deep darkness of her skin, it was brilliantly bright. This scar, slim against her back but nearly as wide as his entire hand, _felt_ older than his entire world.

The Handmaid slowly turned her head, her body remaining perfectly still; she was an exemplar of absolute personal control. In some way he saw Damara in her, and it reminded him that she _was_ Damara, in another life and in a crueler fate; she retained her Beforan life's ability to restrain herself until the right moment to strike, fully realized and taken to a logical extreme.

Hair, glimmering a brighter red as it rolled across her shoulder, moved against his bare chest as she turned to look at him. Here, on Earth-C, with his group alive again and the ancestors of the Alternian trolls returned to their life and fit to see the fruits of their labors (deliberately or not), her eyes were not the white of death but unbelievably intense pools of rust-red. Her pupils were thin slits, dilating slowly as she considered him. Her body was still unmoved, remaining perfectly still as she looked down at him. Even sitting down, even him braced on a stepladder and his hands balanced against her back, she towered over him.

Kankri swallowed, a sudden and unfamiliar swelling of emotion rising from what felt like something deep in his gut. Heat flared from the base of his rear thorax all the way to his food-chute, and the sensory quills lining his back – just behind the gills, that, on a land dweller, had consigned him to culling if his off-spectrum color was insufficient – rattled nervously. It occurred to him that she looked _so much_ like Damara as he knew her. Her eyes were the same shape, the lashes longer, and it was easy to pretend he was talking to Damara if you ignored the faint scars that looked unpleasantly like her eyes had been removed and replaced. Her broad, handsome face was precisely what Damara's would have become, given a few additional maturation moltings and a full ascension to adulthood; her chitin structure suggested the same province in the nation-state from the eastern reaches of Beforus that Damara had come from.

She shifted against him, not _exactly_ suggestively, but she also had Damara's talent for being able to do with a small gesture what, say, Latula, required a book of dirty limericks and a lot of obscene gesticulations to convey. The Handmaid could make a brief tilt of her head an invitation to something that could _instantly_ boil Kankri to stupefied submission.

She wasn't just taller than Damara had ever had the chance to grow to – though with their new lives, she was catching up on that. The Handmaid was... and Kankri searched for a more appropriate or at least polite term. He settled on _bigger._ Yes, she was bigger than Damara, and Damara had already been imposingly large; not quite as massive as Meenah, not possessed of the same motherly curves as Latula, but she'd still eclipsed the others in their group. The Handmaid, though, seemed to be what Damara would have become if time had been kinder, and of late Kankri had been in a position to investigate this in, yes, _intimate_ circumstances. The Handmaid's build was broader, her hips wider than the circumference of his grasp. Her legs larger around than his body.

(For her part, the Handmaid had long considered Kankri with a speculative frame of mind. He looked so much the Signless, the Sufferer; the prophet she had love from afar even as she knelt her head down and sowed his doom. She was there when the Sufferer had gazed up at the moment of death, looked right into her eyes. Her heart was long past breaking, too weary and hard to break anymore, but she still felt a glimmer of shame as he _understood_ the entirety of his life, and he screamed his outrage to the heavens.

(Kankri was the Signless. Smaller, just as afraid. The Signless, the Sufferer, had been rough and angry and seething with emotion until you could just imagine fire leaping from his eyes and out his mouth. She had seen him face down an empire from afar, so resolute and burning with rage that this world could exist and make such pain. He had refused to bend his knees before the Empress or before the Grand Highblood, spitting up too much spite and purely platonic loathing for them and all they represented.

(She had to love hatred like that, love a troll doomed to die. And it was all her fault. And she saw this in Kankri, this angry troll too confused to work out how to direct the fury. And he was hurt so badly already; the urge to protect him from more of it was... enticing. It was a good feeling, a _red_ feeling with enough of a hint of pale in it to be truly new for her. The first good, new thing she had felt in a very long time.)

Slowly, the Handmaid turned around, shoulders shifting and her face tilting so that she looked right at him. She could intimidate him just by politely sitting there and looking at him, just as she was now. She winked at him, very slowly and calmly. Her rust eyes were clean, with none of the glowing of Lord English's unholy power; with his source of his might broken, she was weaker for it but freed. Her lips, thick and full and her fangs short enough not to dimple them as with many other trolls, quirked in a faintly amused expression.

Kankri was aware that he was sweating a bit. Faint red color flushed down his jawline.

With a brief motion, the Handmaid raised a hand to his face; a palm big enough to engulf his head gently docked against the side of his face. She chuckled, a warm and bright sound that would have been startling to anyone else familiar only with her cold and weary demeanor.

Kankri knew well the terms of their particular relationship, when she signaled her permission. He leaned forward, as if for a kiss and both of them knowing full well he was too small to do so without her assistance. She leaned back, her hair falling completely free of her shoulders and splashing into the water, where it was pooling around her knees. As for Kankri he rose up into the air with the faint shimmer of psionic power curling around him. The Handmaid had the power to potential hurl planets as melee weapons, and she could very easily have crushed his body with no real effort. And yet she handled him delicately, aware of her mental power over him; not like he was made of glass and straw, but that he was much like anyone else and extremely easy for her to hurt.

He could not express the relief that simple observation gave him. As she lifted him to her face, leaning inward for the kiss, he did his best to convey his feelings on the matter. The warmth of the kiss indicated that she most likely understood.

She floated him down back to the ground, and she calmly disrobed, turning around again. Her old green dresses had long since been destroyed or cast away; she hated them as much as he hated the red sweater Porrim had made him wear, and she'd rumbled to him how much she hated wearing her slaver's colors n her, as if telling the universe who she belonged to. Now that she was free, and truly safe for once in her life, she didn't want anything to do with his sense of style.

Now the Handmaid wore clothing the same color as her rust blood. An elegant robe, not exactly expensive or fancy but very ornate – alchemizing rendered the cost of such things a moot point, after all – splashed into the water as she lowered herself into the water, which made the water level rise considerably. The whole affair would have made him extremely uncomfortable in his younger days, but they had talked about this and negotiated boundaries considerably. At least, his boundaries had been; the Handmaid did not, outside of a few very dangerous areas, have _any_ boundaries he had been able to make out. The space between them was so comfortable and gentle that at the moment, her completely disrobing in front of him was about as sexual as a pile of soft clothes.

The bath was a special kind made to accommodate trolls such as himself and his Alternian counterpart Karkat, and their tendency to romance trolls far larger than them. The larger of a pair could sit at a comfortable height at the very bottom, their size lifting their heads above the waters. At the same time the smaller of the two could stand on the steps in the water right behind him, the support of which formed a comfortable surface for the larger troll's back to rest against, so the smaller troll (or other creature, like a human or carapacian) could wash their larger partner with ease.

Trolls varied quite widely in size, but Kankri was unusually – alarmingly, proclaimed his culler in his memories but he was trying not to think about that – small even for an off-spectrum troll. Instead of being able to look over her horns, his face was on level with the back of her head... no, in fact, he was still too small for that. As her hair parted, water sluicing through it and forcing it to divide her neck, he was only tall enough to face that spot where her hair parted on the back of her neck. Still, this served their mutual purposes. The stepladder forgotten, he leaned forward and placed his hands on her shoulders.

Or rather, one shoulder. She was big enough that trying to place his hands on both her shoulders, at the same time, was ludicrous. His hands felt small and impolite, crude and ill-formed, inappropriate on the round and wide surface of her shoulder. The muscle relaxed at his touch, centuries of tension sliding away at his claws, and the disconnect between his self-doubt and her fondness at his warmth surprised him.

She ducked her head into the water, slowly and patiently. She did it like she was working her way through a book titled 'How To Act Like A Normal Troll', complete with instructions on bending her neck downwards. She did it in steps; first hunched her shoulders, then lowering herself slightly at a forward angle. Dipping her head into the water, hair billowing around her-

She slowly rose up. "Hrm," she rumbled.

The tone was not questioning, exactly, but he knew an interrogative sound when he heard it. "Is something wrong?" His tongue almost slipped and he almost called her Damara. She didn't mind, in fact she enjoyed hearing him say her true name, but it felt... _inappropriate_ to him.

"Too much hair," she said, after a long moment. It took the Handmaid a noticeably longer time than the others to speak. It wasn't that she didn't understand the languages of Earth-C. Indeed, she had a profound understanding of language, and had taken to studying both the languages of Alternia _and_ Earth to ensure that none of that was lost, and the works they found drifting from Paradox Space not lost to antiquity. However, the Handmaid had done her terrible work throughout all of Alternia's long and painful history, traveling to every era and all ages without rest or pause, all according to the wicked schemes she was both victim and (she had told him curtly, without shame, just sad resignation) accomplice to. She did not have any special powers to understand the languages of all trolls, and so had to learn them. Idioms from every age, regional variants and dialects from all points of a language's given life, versions sprouting from the same tree as it flowered through a nation or died away only to inspire a newer language altogether, a thousand miles away. A language could change a lot over the lifetime of a single highblood, and the Handmaid learned them _all._ She had plenty of time to do it in. She honestly enjoyed learning languages, delighting in wordplay.

However this meant that she had a lot of languages drifting around in her memory, most of which were not spoken on Earth-C. Some were spoken only by trolls, and even then only those from a specific region: Karkat and Terezi, for instance, were both descendants of a historically oppressed people that had also produced the Signless' genetic source and thus spoke fragments of that people's language, but no one else in their group did. The humans mainly spoke the same language but several knew bits of other languages; Roxy and Dirk had only the remnants of languages so warped by the passage of time they were unrecognizable even to her. And so the Handmaid had to cope with all this, constantly sorting out the right words to speak and translate bits of thought into something that made sense to who she was speaking with.

Consequently, Kankri had to contemplate what she might have actually meant. Clarification was always the safest route. "In... what way?" he asked carefully.

She turned to look at him. By all rights her hair should have dropped over her face, and she had so much it would have completely covered her face and probably her entire front from the top of her head to the primary knee. Her hair instead rippled over head, telekinesis lifting it all above her like a shimmering, dark halo. It slowly shifted, glistening in unusual patterns, and a few strands came impishly close to curling around him. He sniffed and did his best to hide that the faint touches were giving him very pleasurable shivers.

The Handmaid's expression, always so stony and grim, softened. Like granite or concrete turning to clay, or rock-hard dirt becoming the soft and pleasant mud of plains after far too much time without the slgihtest hint of nourishing rain. She was quick to smile around him, affectionate in a way he'd never had with Damara; there was a _need_ to her love, a painful and desperate need to hold him, and he thought of desert plants that could survive for a long time without any water but when it was there they drank deeply, or else they would perish. He would, he'd decided, be that rainfall for her. It was good to be wanted, and even better to be needed.

Her hair twisted in a way that almost looked like hands, and a follice-finger managed to gesture at its own swirling mass. "Too much _hair,_ " she said, eyebrow raising very slightly. "I cannot wash it all on my own."

"Ah." He smiled too, letting the mask of apathy that had kept him alive and apparently unharmed for so long slip, just a little bit. She made it very difficult to keep it on.

He took up the brush as she turned around and drew it slowly, expertly, through her hair.

Her back slid against him, her stiffness breaking in bits and pieces. From her, there was a peaceful and contented noise; trolls did not purr, as such.

But the sound was so much like purring, that it might as well have been called such.


End file.
